An Almost Indispensable Book on the Bible

Where can you find a book about that Bible that is both pastoral and theological? It’s rare. But one has arrived. It is John Frame’s opus: The Doctrine of the Word of God.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to what Dr. J. I. Packer says.

“Recently a former student wrote to me as follows: ‘Dr. Packer, is there a reasonably recent work on the nature of Scripture that you would consider magisterial or close to indispensable, other than the Bible?’ At that time, I could not name a book that met these specifications. But now I can, and this is it.”

Packer continues: “The big idea that holds everything in this big book together is pastoral, and that to my mind is as it should be. As I was writing this foreword, I learned of a Chinese lady, a seventy-year-old watermelon grower named Jin, who said, ‘Reading the Bible is like having God talk to you.’ This is precisely the truth that Frame follows through, start to finish.”

• The main contention of this volume is that God’s speech to man . . . is very much like one person speaking to another. . . .

• My thesis is that God’s word, in all its qualities and aspects, is a personal communication from him to us.

Packer concludes: “So where are we? ‘Magisterial’? Yes. ‘Close to indispensable’? Yes again. Would John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Abraham Kuyper, and B. B. Warfield, Reformed theology’s Fabulous Four (in my book, anyway), enthuse about this volume as I have done? Pretty much, I think. There, I have had my say. Now read on, and taste the good food for yourself.”

In my view, The Doctrine of the Word of God is vital for every Christian. It will be especially significant for everyone interested in biblical counseling. In addition to the themes developed throughout the entire book, Frame has an entire section on The Sufficiency of Scripture.

For a free forty-six pages overview of the book, go to WTS Books.

Join the Conversation

What is your favorite book about the Scriptures?

A Conversation about Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity

Responding to Brian McLaren’s Question # 2: The Authority Question

Welcome: You’re reading “Part 4” of my blog series responding to Brian McLaren’s book A New Kind of Christianity (read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here). Many have engaged Brian’s thinking by focusing on a systematic theology response (visit here for a boatload of links). My focus is on pastoral theology or practical theology. As a pastor, counselor, and professor who equips the church for biblical counseling and spiritual formation, I’m asking: “What difference does our response to each question make for how we care like Christ (biblical counseling) and for how we live like Christ (spiritual formation)?”

The Question of the Bible’s Sufficiency

Brian’s second question is the authority question. How should we understand the Bible? He’s asking, What is the Bible and what is it for? He feels a moral obligation to revisit how we view the Bible.

In defending his revisioning of Scripture, Brian again resorts to caricature. He speaks of preachers passionately decrying psychology because they see the only relevant biblical categories being disobedience and demon possession (p. 68). Well, many of us decry secular psychological assumptions that seek to understand the creature apart from the Creator. However, many of us have spent our lives developing a biblical psychology—a robust understanding of people, problems, and solutions derived from a Bible that we cherish as sufficient, authoritative, relevant, and profound. (See my Soul Physicians for one example.)

He says we’re steering our ship by wrestling with biblical passages in a simple “thou shalt not” way, and thus paralyzed in solving major life-and-death issues (p. 69). Well, many of us have been in the trenches wrestling with real people with real problem, thinking deeply with them about how God’s story intersects with their story. (See my Spiritual Friends for one example.)

Brian further claims that the Bible “offers us no clear categories for many of our most significant and vexing socioethical quandaries” (p. 68). Wow. Some of us talk about the sufficiency, authority, relevancy, and profundity of Scripture for biblical counseling and spiritual formation. Brian presents the insufficiency, incapacity, irrelevance, and shallowness of Scripture for life and ministry.

Read with confidence and applied with wisdom, the Bible offers us categories for thinking about everything we need for daily life and godly living (2 Peter 1:3; Hebrews 4:12-16; 2 Timothy 3:16-17; Philippians 1:9-11; Colossians 2:3-10). I’m baffled as I attempt to visualize a pastoral counseling session from Brian’s perspective of the Bible. In Spiritual Friends I offer 1,000s of sample “spiritual conversations” and “scriptural explorations” all based upon the sufficiency, authority, relevancy, and profundity of God’s Word. What would Brian offer (WWBO)?

WWBO: What Would Brian Offer?

Reading the three chapters in which Brian shares his view of Scripture, I felt like I was watching an episode of American Idol. If Simon Cowell was responding, he might have said, “Sorry, Brian, but that was a mess.” I could almost hear Randy Jackson saying, “Listen dude. Yo dawg. For me for you; I just didn’t get it. It was pitchy and karaoke.”

Brian’s Bible is filled with internal inconsistencies (p. 81) because his Bible is neither authoritative nor inspired (pp. 82-83). His Bible was never intended to provide answers to deep questions, but rather to stimulate conversations without any final direction (p. 92).

Why? Because for Brian the God of the Bible (using Job as an example) is “not the actual God necessarily, but the imagined God, the author’s best sense of God, the fictional character playing God for the sake of this dramatic work of art” (p. 94). Try telling that to the person in the midst of horrible life suffering. Try telling that to the person in need of empowered wisdom to break the chains of a besetting sin.

WWJS: What Would Jesus Say?

Brian sees the Bible through evolutionary lenses. In each generation, it was the current best attempt to conceptualize who God is, who we are, how we relate to God and to one another. We need to come to the Bible with more enlightened eyes, more evolved insight—according to Brian.

Brian also says that he wants us to return to the place where we look at the Bible through Jesus’ eyes. He says he is “a follower of Jesus and a devoted student of the Bible” (p. 83). Taking him at his word, I want us to ask together, “What would Jesus say?” Did Jesus see the Bible the way Brian sees it?

Jesus tells us that “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). In the midst of personal suffering, trials, and temptations, Jesus clung to and exhorted us to cling to the sufficient, authoritative, relevant, and profound Word of God.

Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished” (Matthew 5:17-18). In the midst of a sermon on personal, social ethics Jesus related Old Testament truth to daily life, in so doing teaching us to trust in the sufficiency, authority, relevancy, and profundity of Scripture for life, ministry, and relationships today.

Clearly, we can all misinterpret and misapply Scripture. No one should claim that their interpretation or application is inspired or inerrant. However, that’s infinitely different from claiming that the Bible itself is not inspired or inerrant. That’s why we must interpret and apply the Bible humbly in community. Humbly—but with confidence that God’s Word provides the wisdom we need to love God and others. Without that humble confidence in the sufficiency, authority, relevancy, and profundity of Scripture we have no basis for biblical counseling and spiritual formation.

The Rest of the Story

In our next post, we explore the God question. Brian asks, “Is God violent?” We respond to his response—through the lens of biblical counseling and spiritual formation.

Join the Conversation

What view of and use of the Bible do you follow as you minister God’s Word to hurting and hardened, suffering and sinning people?

Conversations on the Future of Biblical Counseling

Part 4: What Makes Biblical Counseling Truly Biblical?

Note: Welcome to our blog mini-series on The Future of Biblical Counseling. I’m sharing my expanded version of an interview Brad Hambrick (BCH) of the ABC did with me. Read earlier posts: post 1, post 2, post 3.

Dreaming a Dozen Dreams

Brad and I will soon begin to dialogue about each of my twelve dreams for the future of biblical counseling. Before we dialogue, I want you to have the big picture of those dozen dreams. I trust that you will be edified by my original article. But more than that, I hope you will read it as a good “Berean” by using God’s Word to evaluate my views. Today I share the first ¼ of that original article.

The Future of Biblical Counseling: Dreaming a Dozen Dreams

Introduction: What Makes Biblical Counseling Truly Biblical?

As I speak around the country on biblical counseling and spiritual formation, I’m frequently asked the question. “When you say ‘biblical counseling,’ you don’t mean ___________ do you?”

Various people fill in that blank with different labels—all negative to them. What a shame that placing the word “biblical” in front of “counseling” causes so many in the church to recoil in fear. Something has gone terribly wrong.

But there’s good news—the tide is turning. Warped caricatures of biblical counseling are being replaced by scripturally and historically accurate portraits of counseling that are truly biblical—and attractive (Titus 2:10). While no one can provide the final, authoritative definition of biblical counseling, I offer for your consideration this summary understanding.

Christ-centered, comprehensive, compassionate, and culturally-informed biblical counseling depends upon the Holy Spirit to relate God’s inspired truth about people, problems, and solutions to human suffering (through the Christian soul care arts of sustaining and healing) and sin (through the Christian spiritual direction arts of reconciling and guiding) to empower people to exalt and enjoy God and to love others (Matthew 22:35-40) by cultivating conformity to Christ and communion with Christ and the Body of Christ.

Given this working definition, envision with me the nature and shape of the future of biblical counseling—twelve dreams of one possible future for biblical counseling as practiced by lay spiritual friends, pastors, and professional Christian counselors.

Dream Number One: Biblical Counseling Will Be Scriptural

Biblical counseling will cling tenaciously to the supremacy, sufficiency, and profundity (depth of wisdom) of the Scriptures. God has provided us with all that we need for godly living (2 Peter 1:3). The Scriptures, rightly interpreted and carefully applied, offer us all-encompassing insight for life.

The Bible provides us with the interpretive categories for making sense of life experiences from God’s perspective. By building our counseling models on Christ’s gospel of grace, we obtain wisdom for bringing people healing hope, the stimulus for change (God’s glory), and the understanding of human motivation that energizes these God-honoring changes.

Dream Number Two: Biblical Counseling Will Be Theological

Too often, current models of biblical counseling start and end at the Fall—focusing almost exclusively on human depravity. As a result, they often counsel Christians as if they are still unsaved—apart from the justifying, redeeming, regenerating, and reconciling work of Christ.

Biblical counseling will unite Creation, Fall, and Redemption. In studying a biblical theology of Creation, biblical counseling will examine people—God’s original design for the soul (anthropology).

In probing the Fall, biblical counseling will examine problems—how sin brought personal depravity and suffering (hamartiology).

In investigating the Bible’s teaching on Redemption, biblical counseling will examine solutions—the gospel of Christ’s grace which offers eternal salvation and provides us with daily victory in our ongoing battle against the world, the flesh, and the devil (soteriology).

Creation, Fall, and Redemption also have psychological correlates. Creation is biblical psychology—the biblical study of the soul. The Fall is biblical psychopathology—the biblical study of the sickness of sin. Redemption is biblical psychotherapy—the biblical study of God’s healing of the soul through Christ.

In the minds of some, the use of these psychological terms is invalid. How sad that we have allowed the world to steal these solidly biblical/theological/historical terms. It is time that we took back our heritage and redefined these terms. Franz Delitzsch, writing in 1861 (before the advent of modern secular psychology), noted that “biblical psychology is no science of yesterday. It is one of the oldest sciences of the church.”

Psychology is native to our faith. Not secular psychology, but biblical psychology—understanding and ministering to the soul designed by God, disordered by sin, and redeemed by grace.

Extending the Conversation

1. When you hear the phrase “biblical counseling” what comes to mine? Is your initial reaction positive or negative? Why?

2. In 75 words or less, how would you define “biblical counseling”?

3. How would your definition of “biblical counseling” differ from mine? What about my definition surprises you?

4. How would you define the sufficiency of Scripture?

5. Why do you think many current models of “biblical counseling” focus on depravity and the fall, and tend to minimize creation and redemption?

6. Are you surprised at all by the quote, “biblical psychology is no science of yesterday. It is one of the oldest sciences of the church.”

The Rest of the Story

I invite you to return for our next post as I share dreams three, four, five, and six for the future of biblical counseling that’s truly biblical.